Gove launches IT education recruitment drive

Education secretary Michael Gove has launched an education recruitment blitz designed to improve the quality of IT teaching in England.

Mr Gove is hoping to entice top graduates to train as Computer Science teachers with a £20,000 scholarship programme supported by the Chartered Institute for IT and industry experts such as Microsoft, Facebook, BT and IBM.

Any graduate with a 2:1 or first class degree will be eligible to apply for one of the 50 scholarships to undertake a Computer Science Initial Teacher Training course.

Candidates will be judged on their enthusiasm, subject knowledge and potential to teach.

"Computer Science is not just a rigorous, fascinating and intellectually challenging subject. It is also vital to our success in the global race," the education secretary said.

"If we want our country to produce the next Sir Tim Berners-Lee - creator of the web - we need the very best Computer Science teachers in our classrooms. They need to have the right skills and deep subject knowledge to help their pupils."

The Department for Education also announced that funding will be ended for the existing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) teacher training courses to make way for new Computer Science courses from September 2013.

Around 500 existing teachers will also be retrained to teach the subject, approximately half of which will be "expert teachers" who will be expected to pass on their knowledge to others in teachings jobs.

These changes tie in with the announcement made by Mr Gove earlier this year that the ICT curriculum was to be replaced by a "more rigorous" new Computer Science regimen.

"Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch," he said.